Untangling the World’s First-Known String

Untangling the World’s First-Known String

[introductory music]

Voice 1: What makes us human?

Voice 2: A very beautiful day.

Voice 3: Little termite farm.

Voice 4: Things that create wonder.

Voice 5: Social media.

Voice 6: Forced migration.

Voice 1: What makes us human?

Voice 7: Stone tools.

Voice 8: A hydropower dam.

Voice 9: Pintura indígena.

Voice 10: Earthquakes and volcanoes.

Voice 11: Coming in from Mars.

Voice 12: The first cyborg.

Voice 1: Let’s find out. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human.

Eshe Lewis: String is an overlooked wonder. It’s the foundation of textiles, which become clothes, bags, rugs, and nets. Some of my aunts sew, and I have fun childhood memories of running my fingers over spools of thread in their workrooms.

These days. when I see string in isolation, it’s usually a nuisance. When it trails from a seam or winds around a fresh bought bouquet of flowers, I brush it aside, and I don’t think about it twice. But if there’s anyone who can convince us to appreciate string, it’s paleoarchaeologist Bruce Hardy.

Bruce is a professor of anthropology at Kenyon College. Not only has he found the oldest string on record, but he’s using it to help untangle some of the prejudices around Neanderthals, pun intended. Today I’m speaking with him about that string.

I guess to start out. Can you tell me what counts as string?

Bruce Hardy: Well, what counts as string is twisted fibers. I mean, as simple as making one set of twists in a series of fibers gives you increased strength because those fibers are creating friction with one another, and they can’t be pulled apart. And the more fibers you put in, the stronger the string or the stronger the yarn or the cord … There are various terms that are used.

Eshe: You recently identified the oldest piece of string on record, and it sounds like this little string is kind of a big story? Please walk me through that moment of discovery.

Bruce: So I’m working on Neanderthal sites, and the one that I’ve been working on for a good many years now is called Abri du Maras in the Rhone Valley in southern France, and the upper levels date to about 50,000 years, and it goes back to about 250,000 years. And the stuff that we’re looking at for the string is in the upper levels. It’s about 50,000 years old.

One of the main artifacts that we find at sites like this are stone tools because they’re made of stone, and they survive for a very long time. But they have sharp edges and are used to cut a variety of things. What we found over the years is that when you take a flake, which is what a simple stone tool is called, and you chop something up with it, pieces of that material that you’re cutting will adhere to the tool surface. And then, at a microscopic level they can survive when they don’t necessarily survive macroscopically.

So we can see things that are otherwise archaeologically invisible. And that’s the case with the string. So I’ve been doing residue analysis, looking through a microscope at these little fibers and particles and other things on stone tools to try to identify them. I’ve been doing this for many years, and a long time ago, in about 2013, I started seeing individual twisted fibers, individual plant fibers that had a twist in them. Normally, I would discount that kind of thing because we’re both wearing lots of fibers right now in our clothing, and modern fibers can fall and land on the stone tool. But these seemed to be a bit different. They weren’t dyed. They were natural in color. Some of them were multicellular, which is weird because none of the stuff that we’re wearing contains multicellular fibers.

And so we proposed that maybe this was some evidence for string, but it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t sufficient. All it had was a twisted fiber, and that can happen in a number of different ways. We needed to find more structure to it. Then finally, one day I was looking at a new flake—I actually just picked it up in my hand and looked down and saw this little white dot on it, and I said, “Oh, well that’s definitely something I have to look at.” So I put it under the microscope and brought it into focus, and it was a whole bunch of twisted fibers; lots of fibers twisted around; very, very fine fibers but also some larger bundles. It was pretty clear that something was going on here, but we weren’t sure exactly what.

You asked me to describe the moment we knew. Well, it’s kind of a drawn-out moment, to be honest with you, because we tried different types of imaging. And it turned out that there were three bundles of fibers, all of which were twisted clockwise. And then those three bundles, which formed individual kind of yarns, were twisted back counterclockwise in the other direction on each other. And that’s the way string forms. Each level you go up, each thing you add, you’re going to do the opposite twist to it.

And when you make cord—you can do this yourself, you could start making cord—it takes a while. But if you get the right kind of plant fibers, you can actually take a hand and just run it across your leg where the fibers are, and the fibers will twist with your hand. And then when you let go of it, they’ll twist back in the other direction. So it kind of forms itself when you’re making cordage. In this case, what was really cool about it was that we had those three bundles of cord—it’s three-ply cordage, so it’s a very small, very thin cord, but it would have been extremely strong.

To be a Paleolithic fiber expert is to be one of a very small number of people because we don’t have very many specimens on these things. So we worked with that, and we also worked with some folks who were experts at Raman spectroscopy because we knew that publishing this find, publishing 50,000-year-old string, required really strong evidence because it’s counterintuitive that it’s going to survive that long.

So we decided to also bring in the Raman spectroscope, which can go in and molecularly characterize a material. And you shoot a laser at it—and this is not my area of expertise at all—and you get an excitation curve off it, and you can identify different molecules. And so when we did that, we were able to identify cellulose and hemicellulose and show that it indeed matched with what we said it was, which was plant material. It wasn’t something modern, it wasn’t something synthetic. It really was plant: a pine or juniper or something like that. You can’t get the exact species. But we knew that that’s what the fiber was coming from in the first place.

Eshe: So is there any consensus in your work about who would have made this string?

Bruce: So at this site and in this part of Europe at 50,000 years ago, the only hominin that you have around are Neanderthals. All the tools at the site are Neanderthal. It’s a Neanderthal site. So it should be Neanderthals who are the ones making it.

Eshe: OK. So what does it take to make string in terms of resources and approach and strategy? I’m trying to get my head around what you would need in order to be able to make string that not only counts a string but is as strong as you’re describing.

Bruce: So the Neanderthals who are making this string know a lot about plants and have a different way of viewing a tree, in my opinion. What we found around here in doing experiments, because we’ve harvested a lot of bark and made a lot of string, is that the best time to do it is when the sap is rising in early summer.

And really about here … and I’m here in Ohio … about mid-June. If you wait another month, it’s going to be really hard to get that bark off there. You’ve got to have an idea of seasonality. You’ve got to know when to harvest this material that you’re going to use to make string. Also—and you don’t have to do this, but it makes it a lot easier to work and a lot easier to get off—you need to take the bark, the inner bark—and it’s going to still have some of the other bark attached to it—and you need to “ret” it, which means you need to submerge it in water for a week or two. And that’ll break down some of the connective fibers and allow you to get those inner fibers out and then separate them, so they’re not a big bundle of fibers but actually individual fibers. That’s going to give you that strength when you start twisting those.

You have to know a lot about the material itself and choosing the material. So the Neanderthals who are doing this, they know what’s going on. You’ve got several steps along the way before you then get to the part where you’re actually going to start twisting and making this stuff into string.

What I find interesting about this [find] in particular is that most people who do survivalist stuff—who make string and go out in the woods and do this stuff—make [what is called] cordage, but they make two-ply cordage: You get a bundle of fibers and fold them in half, and that’s where you start the beginning of your string. And so you end up with a two-ply fiber. To get a three-ply fiber, you have to lay another bundle of fibers into that—and you can tie them off at the top or do something like this [showing with his hands]—but it’s another step that the Neanderthals are taking to get stronger string.

Eshe: Do you have a sense of why this string was made?

Bruce: Knowing exactly what the string was a part of or what it was used for is one step too far that we can take any of this data. We know we have string. It could have been used for any number of things. It could have certainly been used to haft a stone onto a handle, to tie things together. If you start making string and tying it into patterns, you get bags and nets and all kinds of other useful things.

Anything that you’re going to tie together, any two things that you’re going to make to make structures, to do any kind of, eventually, clothing can all be made this way, either by tying other pieces together or sewing: sewing a seam into leather or something like that if you’re going to use string and not sinew or some other animal product. All of these things are things that you can do starting with this simple thing. And it can be built on from there.

What’s really amazing about it is that this is not the first string that was ever made. I have no illusion about that. I think this is probably an extremely old technology that our species, our genus, has been using for a very long time. Because once you figure it out, it’s really useful. And then the idea of not teaching somebody else how to make it or not figuring out how to pass that on doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen. It’s one of these technologies that we really don’t think about because we take it for granted.

Eshe: I’m wondering what this string adds to what we already know about Neanderthal technology.

Bruce: Well, it gives us a glimpse into the world of perishable materials. So what we find as archaeologists primarily for these early time periods are stone tools and animal bones and human remains (and we occasionally find animal bones that have been modified and some shells and other things like that). It’s all durable material. That means we’re probably missing about 90 percent of the material culture that Neanderthals had. Because if you look around, even today if you look around where you’re sitting, you’re going to see a lot of this stuff is made of stuff that’s going to go away. If we wait 50,000 years, this desk I’m sitting next to, which is wooden, is probably gone. So we’re really looking at this through a very tiny window into the past, and it’s finding something like the string surviving shows you how much we’re missing.

Eshe: Yeah, it’s incredible to try to paint a picture around this finding, right? And I think that says even more about, or asks more questions about, Neanderthal sensibility. It just seems like there’s so much more there that probably feels really exciting but then also frustrating because there’s so many possibilities that aren’t part of our current archaeological record.

Bruce: This is one of the areas that I see where we’re going to be able to continue to make advances in archaeology and get a better understanding of what is going on in the past. If we can continue to find ways to recover the stuff, and we’re doing better at it, but we have to look. And there’s not a lot of people out there looking. I’m one of a relatively few number of experts who do this kind of work, who do residue analysis on stone tools.

Still to this day, in a lot of situations, we dig up stone tools out of the ground, and the archaeologists wash them immediately so that they can look at their technology, look at how the how they were made and things like this. But if we do that before we actually look at them under a microscope, we’re potentially losing this information. And there’s no way to go back in and retrieve it. So we have to be careful with these resources. They’re finite resources as well. We’ve only got so much stuff out there to dig up if we want to answer these questions.

Eshe: Bruce and I continue this conversation after the break.

[break with a SAPIENS ad]

Eshe: So you kind of alluded to this, but I do want to ask anyway: As someone who studies Neanderthal technology, you must have a lot of questions about what hasn’t been left behind. There’s all these things that are not preserved for archaeologists to find thousands of years later, for people to find thousands of years later. What question about Neanderthal technology do you most wish you could answer?

Bruce: Since their original discovery, which was in 1856 in Germany, in the Neander Valley—Neanderthal means “Neander valley”—we’ve been underestimating Neanderthals. There was this idea that they were subhuman; that they were the lowest form of humanity, which was based on not very much. But the work that I’ve done over the years and the work within the last 15 to 20 years certainly has shown that that image of Neanderthals, that old stereotype, is not true. But it still persists. It’s still out there.

Just as an example: When I was going through the review process when I was trying to publish the string article, I had multiple people ask me, “Well, couldn’t it just be that a modern human walked by and dropped the string?” And I’m like, “Why do you have to ask that question? Everything else about the site says Neanderthal. Why can’t we just say Neanderthals made string?”

And so anything that I find—and I expect to find more—that shows that Neanderthals knew what they were doing, that they were perfectly good hominins no worse than we are …That’s what I’m excited about finding more of because it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t add up. If Neanderthals lacked all these abilities that modern humans had and they didn’t, how do they make it in Europe for over 250,000 years? They’re doing something right. And we need to take off our blinders and not assume that we’re not going to find anything like this; that we’re not going to find art, that we’re not going to find other perishable materials, that we’re not going to find small-game hunting (which we do) or use of personal adornment (which we keep finding). All these things have to be there, but we have to be willing and open to the possibility that they’re there. If we say there’s no possibility of it, we’re not going to look for it.

Eshe: When you say that we are, or were, underestimating Neanderthals, can you just tell me who we is and then also why? Why is there this persistent disbelief? Where does that come from?

Bruce: OK. So some of this persistent disbelief comes from our own arrogance. And I mean us—modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens—because we are the only hominin left on the planet. Now that, it turns out, is quite unusual. Until about 40,000 years ago, or maybe even a little bit more recently, there were multiple kinds of humans around. There were Neanderthals. There was the group out in Siberia known as the Denisovans, and we only mostly know them from their DNA. We have modern humans in Africa. We’ve got Homo floresiensis, which is the hobbit in Flores and in Java and maybe Homo luzonensis in the Philippines. So there’s lots of different hominins out there.

And now we’re the only one. And so from the beginning, it’s been “Oh, we’re the winners.” And also, unfortunately, all this stuff came about, as did most academic disciplines, during the time of colonization. And one of the things that happens when the first Neanderthal find happens in 1856, and then it really gets around in the 1860s, is it gets interpreted within the framework of the time. And so people are looking at European colonial powers or encountering people who don’t look like them everywhere else, and they’re looking at them as the lower races, or savage races, and they establish racial hierarchies. And they do that often by looking at skulls, collecting a whole bunch of skulls, and saying, “Oh, this is the Greek skull” or “the Caucasian skull” that’s up at the top of the ladder. And then we’ve got the African that’s much lower down or the Australian Aborigine, and the Neanderthal gets slotted in at the bottom.

Then soon after that, in 1868, in France, there’s an exhibition at Cro-Magnon, where they find six modern human individuals: people with higher foreheads and more rounded skulls. And they found them with some carved antler and some teeth with perforations in them, like they could have been used on a necklace or something like that. And immediately this is seen as, “Oh, these are the winners. These are like us. These are the first Europeans.” Neanderthal doesn’t have any of that. And so as early as the 1860s, this dichotomy is already being established: The Neanderthal lacks all of these things; modern humans have all of these things. It’s being interpreted in a 19th-century racial framework in which everything is measured as progress. And the high-foreheaded Western Europeans are the ones at the top. They’ve made the progress. Now we found the prehistoric precursor, and they have no idea how old these things are. Nobody knows at this time. But they assume that this is the progress that supplants the Neanderthals.

Eshe: OK.

Bruce: And so that’s where it kind of starts really early on. And then it keeps getting reinforced. So in the late 1800s, and I want to say 1878, cave paintings are found in Spain, and they assume immediately that it’s these Cro-Magnon types who are doing it. Again, they have no idea how old any of it is. And art becomes this modern human threshold that has been passed. And again, Neanderthals don’t have it.

One of the places it plays out is public museums in the early 1900s. So in the American Museum of Natural History, the curator there is a guy named Henry Fairfield Osborn … really, really famous guy … and he starts off working with dinosaurs. And he works with an artist named Charles Knight, who creates these giant murals of dinosaurs and other sorts of things. And he commissions murals to be made showing Neanderthals and modern humans to be hung in the American Museum of Natural History.

In the murals showing the Neanderthal: There’s one who’s crouching down, and he’s flint knapping. The other one is sort of staring down at the ground, holding a club that’s lying on the ground, kind of like he can’t even think of anything to think of. And then you see the modern humans. And the modern humans are in a cave, painting the cave. It’s all men, and the modern human is holding a scapula, a shoulder blade, like an artist’s palette. And then he’s taking his hand, and he’s making these sweeping motions to draw a bison on the wall. And the contrast is huge. And this is the thing that’s getting reinforced. And this is in the AMNH for decades. And it’s tied to a larger political agenda as well because Osborn commissioned these murals for the Hall of Human Origins to be displayed in time for the Second International Eugenics Conference.

Eshe Lewis: OK.

Bruce: If you look at these murals, the Neanderthals are dark-skinned and swarthy, and the painters are white Europeans. And he [Osborn] actually directly makes that link in some popular newspaper articles and other things. So these are things that are all happening. And I’m not saying that that’s where we are now, but that’s the background that we have occurring early on in the discipline.

And then, of course, you have the other elephant in the room: extinction. We don’t see the Neanderthal physical type around after about 40,000 years, and we do see modern humans. So they [Neanderthal] must have done something wrong. And so most of this research starts with that assumption: Neanderthals have a deficiency that we capitalized on. We have to find whatever that deficiency is. And so that’s the lens through which you start your research. And so what is missing here? What is the reason why they didn’t stick around?

Eshe: So this prompts another question. There seems to be a lively, ongoing debate. You’ve done a great job of describing past conversations and questions. But it seems like this debate is going on right now—about Neanderthals and how intelligent they were; inevitably, in comparison to modern-day human beings, how creative they were; this question of art. And so if I bring that back to string, what do you think the string finding adds to those discussions?

Bruce: Well, I think it problematizes this dichotomy, this dichotomous thinking that we have where we think that Neanderthals were only capable of this much, and then modern humans came along and did all the rest of it; they had all the real advances and did everything else. I think that problematizes that. It says, “No, it’s not. We can’t say one way or the other because we’re missing too much stuff, and the string you’re showing us is yet another example of some pretty advanced cognitive behavior among Neanderthals.” And, to be honest, it just makes sense. They’re not very different from us. And now we know from recent ancient DNA studies and everything that there’s a lot of interbreeding that goes on between modern humans and Neanderthals. And that, basically, in the late Pleistocene, if you were an upright hominin, you probably got it on with somebody else.

And there can’t be that much difference between these groups of people. Cultural differences, I imagine, sure. I mean look at the cultural differences we have today—language differences, different habits, and things like that—but how different can they be if you’re going to have kids together. If Neanderthals don’t have the wherewithal to do anything they want to in their environment, why are they there? Why do they survive as long as they do? Why didn’t they go extinct well before modern humans show up? They were doing something right. And we need to be able to say that; we need to acknowledge that and quit being so high and mighty about modern humans and winning everything.

This stuff speaks to a lot of larger issues for me. When I was in graduate school, I remember thinking, “Is this really something I should be doing? Is this really something that’s important in the world? To study this really remote time period? Does it really matter at all?” Now I look back at that question, and I think this is actually really important because we use the past as a political tool today, as we were talking earlier. We use the past to reinforce ideas, to reinforce hierarchies, in ways that started in the 1800s. And we’re still doing the same thing, and it’s led me to think that I actually need to do more than I’m doing and get these ideas and these messages out even farther. So I’m actually working on a trade book project to try to get some of these ideas to a broader audience.

Eshe: Maybe we could take this time to have you answer as a way of winding down, string pun! Why does it matter that we better understand Neanderthal tools and technology?

Bruce: Well, I think that it matters that we understand Neanderthal tools and technology for a lot of different reasons. Where we came from is a constant question. And that’s a lot of what’s in all of this research. How did we get to be what we are today? How are we modern humans? At what point do we become human? At what point, if we look into the past, do we go “Ah, that’s somebody who I recognize. That is a person like me.” That’s a very difficult question to answer. But I think we’ve taken the easy route by answering it the way we’ve typically answered it is when we have somebody who has a high forehead who may be or maybe not has art and other things like that. That’s when it happened, and it’s recent.

The other reason that I think we need to look at Neanderthal technology is because we have to recognize the social history surrounding it. We have to recognize that it began in a time of colonialism, as did most of the academic disciplines that higher education pursues today. If we don’t confront that idea and its ramifications, we might just be continuing to repeat the mistakes of the past. And so we really need to take stock of that. That doesn’t mean making Neanderthals out to be the geniuses of the Pleistocene. But we need to stop treating them like the morons of the Pleistocene if the evidence backs it up, which I think it does, increasingly. So I think that those are some of the reasons we need to go ahead and continue to search for what’s going on back there. We’re very arrogant as a species, and this is a way we subtly reinforce that superiority that we feel. And I don’t think that’s a good thing for humanity.

Eshe: This sounds like a great invitation for us to reevaluate. You know, on this podcast, we ask—and I think at the magazine, we ask—what does it mean to be human? And maybe [we should] be comfortable with the fact that what we think makes us human doesn’t make us less special if we’re doing things that other species do or that species that are no longer with us did. I think there’s a really beautiful opportunity to think about ourselves as connected to other species instead of trying to distance ourselves. What makes us different is that we are so much better as opposed to perhaps what makes us human is also being part of different legacies. And that isn’t necessarily a threat.

Bruce: No, and emphasizing connections over differences is something that I feel we need to work at in general. And if it goes farther back in the past, why does that diminish what we are here today? I mean, if we go back to the DNA, all modern humans, from what we know now, have some percentage of Neanderthal DNA. So at some point, they’re ancestral. Why not just accept that and fold them in as one among many, many relatives and ancestors of the past?

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Eshe: This episode was hosted by me, Eshe Lewis, featuring Bruce Hardy. Bruce is a professor of anthropology at Kenyon College. He has worked extensively on the Paleolithic period in Europe and Africa, particularly with early hominins and Neanderthals.

SAPIENS is produced by House of Pod. Cat Jaffee and Dennis Funk are our producers and program teachers. Dennis is also our audio editor and sound designer. Christine Weeber is our copy editor. Our executive producers are Cat Jaffee and Chip Colwell. This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship.

SAPIENS is an editorially independent podcast funded this season by the John Templeton Foundation with the support of the University of Chicago Press and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. SAPIENS is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. Please visit SAPIENS.org to check out the additional resources in the show notes and to see all our great stories about everything human. I’m Eshe Lewis. Thank you for listening.